Dorothy Hood (1918–2000) is considered a trailblazer among female Modernists for her large-scale works that merge elements of abstraction and color field painting. Raised in Houston, Hood studied at RISD and the Art Students League of New York before settling in Mexico City in 1941. Over the next two decades, she became immersed in the city’s rich bohemian culture and befriended well-known Mexican artists and intellectuals and European émigrés. Hood returned to Houston in the early 1960s, where she produced some of her most celebrated canvases. Hood’s paintings, which often refer to natural events, are noted by their expansive imagery and sweeps of color indicative of the southwest.
Although she received the support of influential critics and curators, including Clement Greenberg, unfortunately she did not receive the widespread acclaim of her female peers like Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner—due in part to her absence from the New York art world. Her work is held in private collections and at several museums, most notably the Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.